The Authoritative Word: The Cultural History of Dictionaries in England 1600-1800

As this lively new study effectively demonstrates, dictionaries serve as far more than just simple reference tools-they also offer a rich fund of information about people in society. Before now, the extent to which dictionaries encode social history, as opposed to merely relaying linguistic information, has gone almost entirely unnoticed. In this illuminating new book, Linda C. Mitchell analyzes the complex and changing relationship in the early modern period between authority and lexicogra...